The PuSh Festival makes its way to New Westminster

Whether it's dance, multimedia, circus acts, or something in between, the PuSh International performing arts festival never fails to deliver arts extravaganzas to audiences around Metro Vancouver—and New Westminster will be host to one of those performances during the first week of February.

Émilie Monnet will be performing Okinum at the Anvil Theatre on Thursday, Feb. 2 and Friday, Feb. 3 at 7:30pm. There will also be online performances from Feb. 2 to 5, and a post-show talkback on Feb. 2. Monnet is of Anishnaabe-Algonquin and French descent, and currently lives between the Outaouais and Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyaang/Montreal.

"Okinum is an autobiographical piece that follows me in my quest to decipher a recurring dream that I've had about a giant beaver that comes out of the water and gives me a little bag and speaks some magical words. So, I'm trying to decipher what the beaver wanted to tell me, and what this dream was about," Monnet tells New West Anchor, adding that she'd had the dream three times and knew instantly she had to pay attention to its meaning.

"As I'm trying to decipher, I'm starting to make connections between the beaver and my family, and my lineage. The piece also addresses, in a more poetic way, the notions of internal dams. That's what Okinum means: it means 'beaver dam.' The dam became a metaphor to address what things block in us, and the journey to remove all these pieces of wood from the dam so that water of ancestral memory can flow down."

Monnet is Anishinaabe through her mother, and while she says her mother is more Anglophone, it was the first language of her maternal grandfather.

"It made a lot of sense that those three languages were present on stage and co-existed, because they are the three languages that form my identity ... It's still a language that's part of my identity," explains Monnet, noting that her mother is more Anglophone, while her father is from France; her first language is French.

There are two versions of Okinum: one is in French, the other in English. Monnet will be presenting the English version during the festival.

"The multi-language aspect is a very big part of my process. I'm very fascinated by the energy of language, and how these sit in different spaces within our bodies and emotions. It was a really interesting process because the piece was first created in French," says Monnet, who also observed the differences while working on the play between her triad of languages.

"When we did the work of translating the play into English, it was seven or eight pages shorter, and [the English language] makes me think of arrows. It's more direct, you don't need as many words as in French, for example. Anishinaabemowin, being a language that is so descriptive and based in words and actions, it makes you see [the description] in your mind.

"For example, if you go into the etymology of the word [okinum], it's translated like, 'a gathering of bones, of tree bones, a cemetery of tree bones.' It's a language that's richer, I find, in images and in bringing in [an awakening] of your senses."

The monologue performance is scored by Jackie Gallant and makes use of sound and visual storytelling techniques.

If you'd like to purchase tickets to Okinum, you can do so through the Anvil Centre's website. You can learn more about the PuSh Festival in this great piece our sister publication, the Georgia Straight put together.